rats!!!

i wonder where the phrase "rats!" came from. you know, you miss your bus..."rats!" you lose a game of monopoly..."rats!" you stub your toe on the cupboard..."rats!" it seems like a very comical and not-intense replacement for other 4-letter words that i would probably use instead. rats just doesn't seem like you really mean it. well, speaking of rats, we caught rat #2. after escaping two of the traps we had set up, grant heard him the other night and went to the kitchen just in time to see his head get snapped as the little rodent went for the oh-so-obviously-placed peanut butter. i guess they're getting desperate. anyway, he was not dead, but just alive enough to hurl him, trap and all, under the stove, beyond our reach. so we called harry, our diligent maintenance man, to have him dispose of our little friend in a slightly more humane way than a brick and a shovel. so 2 down, how many to go? i've heard that where there's one rat, there's 10. fabulous. atleast we're moving in a month.

it's the 4th and final week at my music school's summer music festival. out of the 5 classes i'm teaching, i haven't had one white kid yet. i can't explain the agony of trying to pronounce all these names. citlali, naima, valeria, jesus (this one isn't hard to pronounce i guess, just strange to call a growing hormonal adoloscent boy the same name as well, you know, the jesus from the bible), travell, azelle, and the list goes on. so last week we had an intro to the piano class, and this group of kids comes in and in the mix of brown and black faces, there comes this little white face with nearly white hair and freckles covering his cheeks from the sun. he couldn't have looked more like every little dutch boy in every town of northwest iowa. after stumbling through every kids' name and sweating from pronunciation exhaustion, i ask him his name and with a grin he says, "andrew." in the most northwest iowa accent you could find. he was like an exact replica of my little brother 10 years ago. same name and all. strange.

my life the past few days has been as follows: sunday morning, woke up, put on my swimsuit, biked to borders, purchased the new 759 page harry potter book, cramed it into my already overflowing beach bag, biked to my favorite beach, and proceeded to begin, or should i say continue, the beautiful journey of what would be the last leg of my love affair with harry potter. hours later, lake michigan still at my side, the sun starting to droop in the sky, i was fully emerged in the lives of harry, ron, hermione, voldemort (or should i say he-who-must-not-be-named) and the wizarding world. sunday evening, a brief bike ride home, continued reading, a brief break for a jog through the park, more harry potter. i fell asleep with the book at my side. monday--wake up, bike downtown, teach my morning classes, find a patch of grass, read for 4 hours, teach my afternoon classes, get home after hearing overhang play and seeing tricia, read until my eyelids are too heavy. sleep. tuesday--wake up, teach morning classes, read for 4 hours on my break, only stopping to pretend i was interesting in food at the resturaunt nearby so i could then politely decide i wasn't and use their bathroom instead, pop in a beethoven movie for my afternoon class so i didn't have to lesson plan and could read longer, go home, hit up trader joes, sit in my room reading all night, only popping out for food. today--wake up, get on the train to my school, read the whole way, read while i'm walking, (which proved very tricky cuz it's a heavy book and chicago is crowded), teach my morning classes, hurry them out as fast as possible, and retreat, once again to my lovely patch of grass that has become my harry potter haven for 3 days standing. the last 100 pages were a blur. i was eyes were darting from line to line so quickly i could barely take it all in. i laughed, a cried, i laughed through my tears, i was afraid, i felt triumphant, i felt confused--(seriously, did anyone else really catch what exaclty was going on?) and now i feel sad that it's over. i can move on with my life. harry potter will always just be a memory of my childhood. and my 20s i guess. sniffle sniffle.

many have asked about the rat. it remains a mystery. we have cleaned, we have sealed off all possible access to food, we have called the landlords, we have set traps. and now we wait in horrific anticipation as every morning i wake up, poke my head timidly into the kitchen, and pray that i don't see a rat writhing helplessly in the little glue trap with peanut butter plopped in the middle.

our new roomie

this week we had an unexpected visitor grace us--or should i say our food cupboard--with his presence. here is the story written by kristin, copied and pasted by me into this blog:

So Grant and Carolyn and I have know for a few days now that we have amouse. Or something. The bite marks in the cheese-filled pasta bag werethe first clue. Then we remembered the disappearing ramen last week, andthe cracker crumbs all over the cookbook drawer a few months ago.So, reluctantly, we mobilized our forces. We bought two types ofmousetraps, filled them with peanut butter, and waited. Grant woke up at2:30 am that first night, shook me and said: "I think I heard themousetrap!" The next morning, we found the traps - snapped shut, butmouseless.This was our first clue that our enemy was greater than we had anticipated.We bought a third type of mousetrap - the all-powerful glue trap. Grantarranged our food cupboard so that the mouse (or something) would have tomaneuver around five traps in order to get in. (It's a low cupboard, and hasapparently been an easy source of sustenance for our little friend.) Thenext morning, most of the traps had been moved, and none contained a mouse.Our fear grew.The next night, Grant couldn't sleep. He was sitting on the couch at 4:30am, when he heard it. *rustle, rustle.* He moved slowly toward thecupboard. *scratch, scratch*. He leaned over the counter, trying to get abetter look. A little nose poked out of the cupboard. Grant jumped back inalarm. Startled, the rodent jumped to the floor and scurried into thekitchen, where it disappeared under the fridge.It was confirmed. We had a rat.
The next day, we could hardly bear to be in the apartment. Somewhere, in the darkest recesses of 4858 N Hermitage, Apt GDN A, a rat hid: watching our every move, waiting for the cover of dark to resume his reign of terror. We brought out the big guns: yet another type of glue trap, but bigger, meant for rats. Once again, night fell. This morning, an insistent knock at our bedroom door revealed Carolyn's pale face, shaking voice, and tear-filled eyes. "The rat..." she whispered. "It's...moving! I...can't..." We jumped out of bed, took one look at the writhing brown body, and ran to the other corner of the house. What now? The rat was still alive and, by the looks of him, quite capable of writhing all the way off the glue trap if we weren't careful. Grant ran to the carto get the shovel. I called my dad for a pep talk: "You've got to kill him!" he said. "You can't be tentative about it - whack him HARD, but remember, there will be blood. Do you have a crowbar?" When Grant returned with the shovel, it seemed too flimsy, and we couldn't get a good angle. Whenever we got near it, it started squirming desperately, trying to pull the trap closer to its hiding place. By closing her eyes, Carolyn mustered up the courage to grab her lunch from the fridge and left for work, still pale, still shaken. Now it was just me and Grant. We scoured the house for anything that might work; there was nothing. Finally Grant went outside and found a brick. He stepped slowly closer, closer, until he was only a few feet away. With a sick look on his face, he closed his eyes and hurled the brick at the rat. There was a huge thud, followed by "SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRIEK!!!""Kill it!" I yelled, burying my face in a pillow! "DO IT NOW!!!" Grant raised the shovel over his head, gritted his teeth..."SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRI...WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!" Silence. Grant scooped up the remains. I scrubbed the floor. We began cleaning outthe cupboard. And we desperately hope that there are no more rats where this one came from.

That's the story. I will spare you the horror of pictures. If only I could place a big fat "THE END" now. But unfortunately, the sauga continues. Tuesday night, I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't live in our apartment knowing that at one point, we weren't alone. I spent nearly 2 hours bleaching, scrubbing, bleaching again, scrubbing again, taking everything out, scrubbing every container of juice, every cook book, every one of grant's bazillion vitamin bottles, and anything else that may have even come close to our little friend. The kitchen was spotless. Disinfected. Bacterialess. And most important, ratless. Finally, at midnight, I proclaimed with triumph: "THERE! Now we can forget about the rat forever and move on." So I thought. Today I got a text from Kristin that said only this: "bad new. more rats." I called within seconds. "What do you mean???" I said with trembling anger and fear behind my voice. Apparently, as Grant went for his vitamins this morning, he found a mass of chips--broken, crumbled, half eaten--decorating the vitamin drawer. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! There are more!!! Seriously, I cannot explain in words the anxiety, disgust, and franticness this causes me. I can't go on until I know they are gone forever. I can't live in that place. Last night i was nearly asleep when suddenly, I jumped up and threw a towel at the bottom of my bed. I thought I had felt something moving. And that was before I even knew our visitors weren't gone. And to think that I thought the movie Ratatouille was cute. The thought of my ignorance makes me want to vomit.

babel

this week, grant got babel in the mail from netflix and i was excited. i've wanted to see it a long time. so on wednesday night, kristin and i settled down on the couch for a relaxing night of babel watching. about 95 % of the way into the movie--maybe about 2 scenes to go--kristin and i both found ourselves up to here (i've got my hand above my head) with all the confusion, different languages, story lines, unexplained people coming in and out of the story line...and for about the 8th time during the movie, i said to kristin, "man, i know it's the point of the movie to have all the different languages without us understanding, but i REALLY just wish we could have captions! i am SO LOST!!!" then we laughed about the possibility that there were supposed to be captions through the whole movie and we didn't know it. but we were like, naaah, couldn't be. but just out of curiosity, we quick flipped to the menu before watching the last two scenes of the movie...and what did we find? "caption options: english, espanol, none" so to wrap it up, we sat through over two hours of a movie in 4 languages, including an entire story line with a deaf girl who did sign language (which were also given captions we found out) thinking that it was some novel artsy film that was trying to make the viewer see what it felt like not to be able to understand anyone and we completely missed the entire story line of the movie. every time i think about it, i have a mixture of irate anger that turns into uncontrollable giggles. i'd like to say it's a beautiful movie, but all i will remember is this feeling: "what the hell is going on??? who's the guy with the gun? why is he hugging her? why did that girl just take her underwear off? isn't that uncomfortable?" and so on. sigh.

i got a job in korea! i'm leaving august 24. teaching english and music to little kindergarteners. ya!!! it's a new school north of seoul in a city called ilsan. it's just me and a couple other teachers and we are basically the organization of the school from the way it sounds. i'm excited to be able to keep teaching music. it seems like every time i think i'm going to leave it, it just hangs on to me.